Geoffrey Hill, a poet regularly hailed as the greatest in the English language, died suddenly on 30 June at the age of 84.

Hill’s wife, the librettist Alice Goodman, announced his death on Twitter. “Please pray for the repose of the soul of my husband, Geoffrey Hill, who died yesterday evening, suddenly, and without pain or dread,” she wrote. Emmanuel College in Cambridge, where Hill was an honorary fellow, confirmed the news.

Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy paid tribute, saying that “he was, in poetry, a saint and a warrior who never gave an inch in his crusade to reach poetic truth. In four words – ‘God is distant, difficult’ – he could suddenly illuminate, like lightning over a landscape.”

Filling the prestigious role of Oxford’s professor of poetry from 2010 until 2015, Hill was knighted for his services to literature in 2012 and was greatly acclaimed by critics and fellow poets. Mercian Hymns, published in 1971, was a collection of prose poems that combined the life of the eighth-century Mercian ruler, King Offa, with memories of Hill’s own childhood in the Midlands. Broken Hierarchies, a collection published in 2013 that assembled 60 years of poetry, was judged by the Times Literary Supplement to be “work of the first importance”.

Sir Geoffrey Hill obituary

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The son of a village policeman, Hill has said that he was “glad and proud to have been born into the English working class”. He went on to study at Oxford University, where he gained a first in English literature and published his first poems.

More than a dozen collections would follow, from King Log to Clavics and Odi Barbare, both nominated for the Forward prize. “What / ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad / and angry consolation,” he wrote in The Triumph of Love. One of his most celebrated works, the Funeral Music sequence, concludes with the lines:

If it is without Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or If it is not, all echoes are the same In such eternity. Then tell me, love, How that should comfort us—or anyone Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place, Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

“England – the matter of, and the matter with England – stands at the centre of his work, but the brilliance and ambition with which he tackles themes of historical process, religion, politics and statehood (as well as the personal past), and the way his work combines subtlety with beauty, means that from a local base he is able to address and include the world,” said Motion. “From the comparatively lucid earlier poems, all the way through to their later and more difficult counterparts, he has been exemplary: a poet of immense gifts and originality and authenticity.”

Winner of awards including the Faber Memorial prize and the Whitbread for his poetry, Hill was also an acclaimed essayist, taking the Truman Capote award for literary criticism for his Collected Critical Writings in 2008.

He was also praised for his work as a teacher. After leaving Boston University, where he worked for 18 years, his colleague Bruce Redford said that he “taught with the dedication and eloquence of an Old Testament prophet, inspiring his students through his fervent commitment to such writers as [George] Herbert and [Gerard Manley] Hopkins and such topics as voice and otherness”.

“Geoffrey Hill’s poetry has been aptly described as ‘at once austere and passionate’,” Redford said. “The same could be said for his contributions as teacher and colleague.”

Biographer and academic Hermione Lee was one of Hill’s champions for the Oxford professorship, and recalled them as stunning performances, with “stringent, compelling analysis of how [poetry] works, combined with a comical, anarchic, self-dramatising presentation of himself as part sage, part anarchist, part bard, part wit: a combination of King Lear and Lear’s Fool.”

Jacqueline Norton, Hill’s editor at Oxford University Press, saluted “a lifetime of brilliant work”. “His fierce intelligence will be much missed,” she said, “as will his moral seriousness.”

Sometimes densely allusive, Hill’s poetry drew enormous critical praise, but was often charged with being difficult to understand. The front cover of his 1985 Collected Poems made much of this, quoting reviews that described his writing as “unbearable, bullying, intransigent, intolerant, brilliant”, as “inaccessibly obscure and strange and mannered”, and from an “immense, baffling talent”.

The poet addressed the criticism in an interview with the Guardian in 2002. “The word accessible is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word,” he said.

“In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together.”